100 days: What Obama wants you to read

One of the Washington media’s most time-honored rituals is starting to flower, with the blossoms at peak for the next week or so.

April 29 will be the 100th day of Barack Obama’s presidency.

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The “100 days” concept has had mythical status since the days of the New Deal, when Franklin D. Roosevelt made history with a blizzard of bold federal actions. And reporters have been addicted to stories around this milestone in every administration since.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod calls the 100th day a “Hallmark holiday,” an essentially artificial event with no genuine significance. But he and his colleagues also know the reality: The early-verdict stories are going to be written, creating both a challenge and opportunity for the new president.

So senior White House aides are playing the game with relish, doling out made-to-order anecdotes and what-it-means analytical insights to help reporters write their 100 days pieces. You can already see the results in a spate of stories that — thanks to competitive pressures — editors are deciding to publish before the actual 100th day.

Full disclosure: POLITICO plunged in with our furrowed brow appraisal of Obama’s first 100 days, which will be published on Friday in a special glossy 100 Days magazine.

For that story, we spoke to top White House officials. So it’s with some authority that we can offer this user’s guide to 100 days stories.

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The White House is pushing back against what it realizes is a dangerous perception that Obama may be trying to do too much, too fast — and cynically exploiting the economic crisis to push through unrelated agenda items. Aides are urging reporters to reread his campaign speeches, dating back to 2006, to see that Obama was upfront with voters on his big ambitions. They are basically right.

Of course, there was never talk of a $787 billion stimulus plan or a $3.6 trillion budget or $1 trillion-plus deficits during those campaign speeches. Look for the 100 days stories to be loaded with full-throated defenses of Obama’s swing-for-the-fences approach.

Obama is a game-changer.

The White House is worried that the public does not sufficiently grasp Obama’s view that his ideas fit together in a coherent strategy to force massive change in government, the financial sector and, ultimately, people’s lives. Obama took a crack at telling this story himself in a recent speech at Georgetown.

The press didn’t really bite. The Wall Street Journal’s Jerry Seib last week wrote a column on how that was the objective of the speech. But there have been few stories that have detailed the president’s broader vision. The obsession with the 100 days milestone is a perfect opportunity for the president’s message-framers to try again.